Princeton man drawing attention to outer space

Saturday

Jul 26, 2014 at 7:06 PMJul 26, 2014 at 8:36 PM

By Alli Knothe TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

PRINCETON — A Northeastern University graduate who majored in physics and math, Justin Dowd has spent the first months of his adult life in his parents' basement drawing images of the solar system with chalk.

"It's tedious but it's coming out well," he said, admitting that his parents were not thrilled with this track. "It's starting to make a little more sense now that I'm actually getting paid to do it."

Mr. Dowd has only a couple of weeks left to complete his stop-motion chalk animation video about the presence of amino acids on comets and what they reveal about life in the universe. He has been hired as a contractor by TED-Ed, which he said will likely post the video on its website by the end of the summer.

"This is a combination of art, education and science that is not something I was planning on doing," he said. "I love this and I love the space industry so I'm kind of getting a piece of both."

With a scientific background and no formal artistic training, Mr. Dowd has managed to go from doodling on the specials menu chalkboard at a Boston restaurant where he worked as a food runner into a career opportunity. Oh, and it got him a ticket to space.

In 2012, thanks to another chalk animation video, Mr. Dowd won a contest sponsored by Metro, an international daily newspaper chain, landing him a seat on a commercial space flight.

During the trip, he will be rocketed 65 miles into the sky, spend about 20 minutes in Earth's orbit, and then head for home.

The trip was originally scheduled for this summer, but has been pushed back a year as the company, California-based XCOR Aerospace Inc., is still working on developing the two-seater spacecraft, Mr. Dowd said. He completed training last summer when he went on a simulated flight in the Netherlands.

While in college, Mr. Dowd was hired by the newspaper chain to make short educational videos using chalk animation on topics like whale brains, gecko feet, black holes and dark matter.

"Every two weeks I was turning out a new video," he said. Shortly before he graduated, TED-Ed, a website that provides a free platform for teachers and students to learn about a slew of topics, accepted his video proposal.

"TED-Ed has a very structured video production process that was different from what I was used to," he said.

He pitched several ideas, and once they settled on one, he wrote a script, which was edited and then recorded by professional voice-over artists. He made a storyboard, moved on to drawing, and is now in the thick of photographing each of the 20 scenes.

Mr. Dowd is creating the entire video with stop motion animation, meaning that he makes slight changes to the set, whether drawing a line or rotating the image before snapping a photo and assembling it on his computer and stringing them together so the images appear to move.

For a transition that will take about four seconds showing the night sky behind a tree, Mr. Dowd said he spent about five hours, slowly rotating the scene between photos.

He created the set using an elaborate system of ladders, duct and electrical tape and other household items like fishing line, file storage boxes and weights.

"Everybody does these things on computers," he said. "I'm kind of a dinosaur."

Contact Alli Knothe at allison.knothe@telegram.com. Follow her on Twitter @KnotheA